EPC and GSMA publish mobile contactless payments white paper

The European Payments Council (EPC) and global wireless trade group GSMA have published a while paper on mobile contactless payments and the role of 'trusted service managers' (TSMs).

The white paper comes after the pair launched a consultation on Sepa and mobile contactless payments at the beginning of the year. They aim to get payment services providers and mobile network operators to cooperate on a system to enable over 500 million Europeans to make Sepa payments using their handsets.

The new paper describes the provision and lifecycle management - including distribution, configuration, activation, maintenance and deletion - of banks' contactless payment applications when integrated with a mobile phone.

It also outlines the role of the TSM, which is to support banks and operators aiming to promote mobile contactless payments. TSMs facilitate the distribution, configuration and activation of the bank's payment application on the Universal Integrated Circuit Card (UICC, or SIM) within bank customers' NFC handsets.

The hope of the EPC and GSMA is that the joint project will boost commercial relationships between issuing banks, the mobile network operators and TSMs and therefore speed the deployment of contactless m-payments.

Dag-Inge Flatraaker, chair, EPC m-channel working group, says: "Building a common architecture for mobile contactless payments is a key objective of the EPC's initiatives for mobile payments in the Single Euro Payments Area (Sepa). The implementation of interoperable and user-friendly mobile payment solutions makes it even easier for bank customers across 32 Sepa countries to access state-of-the-art Sepa payment services."